Energy in Shallow Water

On the way back from the dentists' to-day I saw a girl wearing a miniskirt riding a vespa down a hill on a 55 mph street. The front of the vespa protected her modesty, but I have to think she's taking some frozen genitals home. I definitely have a lot more respect for her than the guy riding a bicycle who positioned himself in front of my car at a stoplight shortly afterwards. I hate it when bicyclists think they're driving something comparable to a car.

I took some stale hamburger buns to the ducks yesterday, and had to search around for them a bit as someone else had brought a dog to the river and scared them away from their usual spot. After I'd finished feeding them, I spotted a bunch of tiny fish in shallow water among a bunch of reeds. They were pretty camera shy, scattering when I got close, but with a little patience I managed to get some decent pictures.









I don't think there are any fish in this one, but I like this picture.


One of the bees I saw on the way back.

There are a lot of damselflies and dragonflies in the area I've been dying to get pictures of, but they're too quick. This is the best I've done so far;



I watched the newest Boardwalk Empire yesterday, and it was the first episode I found to be mostly disappointing. They'd already established that Margaret, the Irish immigrant played by Kelly Macdonald, had read a lot of books when she was a servant in Ireland, and when she found herself at a party Nucky was throwing for a senator and the mayor of Jersey City where Nucky had unsuccessfully tried to convince the two politicians that women getting the vote was a serious idea, I knew she'd somehow demonstrate her intelligence to the men in a way that would be useful to Nucky, further endearing her to him and now becoming an attractive contrast to his airhead girlfriend. Which is okay, if not terribly interesting, though I was annoyed when Margaret, who had been terribly flustered and nervous meeting just with the Atlantic City treasurer, coolly and without a hint of anxiety rattled off some knowledge about world events to the senator and mayor and even argued with them a little. I knew this stock immigrant character would be trouble, and already this car is skidding all over the road. Nucky's a good match for her, though, as so far the self-confident character is worn by Buscemi like an ill-fitting suit. Buscemi has that razor sharp delivery still, and quick, big eyes--there's just too much energy uncomfortably contained. He needs more opportunities to really have a fit. In any case, he's never going to be Michael Corleone.

There seemed to be a push for strengthening the female characters in this one by people who don't appear to know how to do it--Gretchen Mol seducing that thug--because she was hot for him--in the face of him threatening her to find out Jimmy's location was all right until you remember we'd found out in the previous episode he has gonorrhoea. And as much as I like seeing Gretchen Mol naked, it bugs me that she's playing the mother of a guy just nine years younger than her. It was revealed a couple episodes earlier as a surprise that she's his mother--the scene, with him hugging her before identifying his relationship to her, was put together to make us think she might be his mistress. So there seems to be a deliberate plan to show how sexy this lady is for her age but, although all art is a con of one sort or another, this felt like a lousy trick. It's the makers of the show basically saying, "Here's a sexy older woman. But since there's no such thing as a sexy older woman, here's a sexy young woman we're calling a sexy older woman." And I'm saying this as a guy who's not attracted to older women--it annoys me.

Where Roman Emperors Go to Contemplate Flying Machines

I stayed up much later than I'd intended wandering around a sim I found through the Second Life website's Editor's picks. It's called Mythopoeia.


I was immediately impressed by the texturing. And I'm not sure how the mountains in the background work--I think with some kind of forced perspective--but they stayed rezed however far away the camera was from them.


There were several spots, connected by paths, each with its own somewhat historical theme--there was a sort of Roman area, a somewhat Persian area, and a somewhat Steampunk area, but they were all unified by and filtered through a single artistic style.


A little gypsy campsite with a playable guitar and edible soup.



A canal wound around the central store. A sea monster was roaming around in it.







Some kind of flying machine--I tried operating it, but apparently you have to be the owner. I was surprised it was capable of flight at all.

The flying machine was in front of the shop, which had various odds and ends, all of it basically furniture.


Looks like someone else fell for one of those spam e-mails from a "Mi-go prince."


I was really in love with the pianos.





There were several different kinds of thrones on sale.





Several very comfortable beds with moveable sheets.


Tou apparently prefers sleeping with the frog.






I put together this outfit a couple weeks ago, by the way. The mask and vines are by Illusions, the gold mesh is from an outfit by Captive Elegance, the wings are by Edelweiss, the little roses are from an outfit by Bare Rose, and the shoes are by Maitreya.

I listened to the local, streaming radio station while I was there, which was an Internet classical station broadcast from Lowell, Massachusetts. The DJ was very chatty, and told a story about how she zoned out one day on the way home from work but was pulled out of it when a huge raven flew in front of her car. She also introduced a piece by Michael Haydn by saying something like, "Haydn was very popular in his day, but not the Haydn you're thinking of. Joseph's brother Michael Haydn." For some reason that bugged me. I don't know much about classical music--I was aware of a Haydn, but not that there were two and that they were brothers. But imagine you are a classical music aficionado--surely you'd know the difference between the two Haydns. I suppose there is a middle group who really dig "Haydn music" without knowing there are two, but how many people could that be? Who's this lady talking to? Why does she need to so narrowly define her audience?

Ah, I think it really only bugged me because I was coming down off of red wine. Red wine and tequila seem to take the worst revenge on me. I don't mean both at the same time. Gods, that would be terrible.

Twitter Sonnet #191

Citizen shades tread boring commutes yet.
A man is rarely outlived by his pants.
At his high school, few recall Boba Fett.
Slave Leia army seeks salted Jabba.
Gold vines casually constrict on feet.
Harmless glowing paintings replace lava.
Charred rock works into an unlikely seat.
Most sofas have cracker secrets inside.
Phone teeth break slowly through soft button gums.
In LCDs do L shaped walks abide.
Indirectly, ghosts teach some of us sums.
Living abacus is a tadpole swarm.
Tiny smoke signals fill firefly dorm.

From the Chains, the Hounds, and the River

Last night I watched Mervyn LeRoy's 1932 film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. It's a great film about hell.

It's sort of a proto-noir, in that the protagonist, James Allen (Paul Muni), is someone who would more traditionally be considered a villain, though the circumstances that lead to his initial sentencing to the chain gang form a slightly improbable string of melodrama, where Allen's forced at gunpoint to rob a diner. I guess this would be to insure the audience continues to sympathise with the man during his terrible existence in the chain gang. The movie's based on a true story, and the real life James Allen, actually named Robert Elliot Burns, had intentionally stolen in order to feed himself.



But the movie is an effective indictment of the chain gangs in Georgia of the time as we see Muni and his fellow prisoners forced to subsist on meals of pig fat and sorghum, beaten and lashed with little provocation, and receiving no treatment when falling ill. As a pre-Code film, it was also able to show the criminal element more sympathetically than those made after 1934.



The only other movie I'd seen Paul Muni in before this was the wonderful Scarface, also made in 1932. In both cases he comes off with a remarkable intensity, like Cagney in a lot of ways, including his stocky, powerful looking build and quick reflexes. But there's something fundamentally quieter, more self-possessed about him. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang has Muni playing a more regular guy, and here his intensity serves to give depth to an otherwise fairly ordinary man, which helps to convey the film's actual subject, the cruelty of the system in which Allen finds himself. Not just in terms of the penal system, but the general attitude of a society that looks down on people who can't pay for their own food, or who have ambition beyond a comfortable job at home, as Allen first lands into trouble when he becomes a drifter after several unsuccessful attempts to embark on an engineering career. When the ending of the film suggests Allen has no choice but to turn to a life of crime, we believe it.

It's this sense of inevitable doom and the character being punished for operating outside the modes of society that make this film, in my opinion, a clear ancestor of the noir.

Big Destruction

I had a dream last night about Wonder Woman and a car mechanic on the back of a large, flatbed truck speeding through residential areas. The mechanic was wearing a grey jumpsuit and was on his back under a machine of some kind. Occasionally he'd scoot out and look at a sketchbook Wonder Woman was holding up for him. Wonder Woman was wearing a plain orange leotard, the shapes of her nipples on her large breasts plainly visible. The drawing she had in the sketchbook for the mechanic kept changing, every time he looked. The only one I remember was a large, black outline of a "W" with red white and blue stars and stripes designs hastily scribbled with marker. I guess this all may have been inspired by the Jaime Hernandez comics I was reading at the dentists'.

I spent a lot more time at Tim's playing World of Warcraft than anticipated last night. He ran my human rogue through Stratholme, which got me a level up and a lot of loot. I also watched him play the beta version of Cataclysm, as he's one of the testers Blizzard hath chosen. It looks like there will be a lot of improvements when Cataclysm's released--most of what Tim showed me focused on the new Goblin player race, though. I was amused by the section of Orgrimmar shared by the Goblins and the Trolls--filled with palm trees and wooden buildings of the trolls, but polluted by a big pool of oil filled with discarded toys and bottles.

I was personally more eager to see the new Worgen player race, but Tim seemed reluctant to deal with them very much as apparently they're still rather buggy--the female Worgen in particular has a lot of mismatched texturing.

With breakfast to-day, I read "JOHN FOUR," the new story in the Sirenia Digest, a nice, post-apocalyptic tale in Lovecraft's universe taking place in a temple of Nyarlathotep with both a worthy atmosphere of dread and a certain amount of humour about the temple's dreadful denizens.

Then I watched the new Panty and Stocking with Garter belt--I'm in love with Stocking. She took off both stockings to make swords this time. I've been ogling the production and fan art on 4chan to-day.

Faces for Clothes

Some creepy mannequins I saw at Macy's to-day. I like how they're not gaunt, though I suppose they do look a bit like the baby masks from Brazil.

Their faces sort of looked like how mine felt, actually, as I'd just been at the dentist. It's interesting planning your day around a numb face--my appointment was at noon, so I figured I'd have a late breakfast, then after the appointment, I'd stop at the bank, drive downtown, and walk ten blocks to Pokez. After waiting for my food to get to my table, I figured the feeling would have come back enough to where I wouldn't bite the shit out of my cheek the way I'd done last week when I'd tried having a slice of pizza too soon. But I got sidetracked before leaving Horton Plaza mall by a chess game--first I watched two guys playing, one of them resigning I thought rather early, saying other the other guy was clearly winning and would torture him. The guy was winning, and did seem to be a better player, but both of them had been overlooking a lot. I had my impression of the winner's abilities confirmed when I played against him and won, using black. Here's what the board looked like at the end;



After the opening moves, I started laying traps which he avoided by making moves that put him in even worse positions--I was preparing to fork his King and Bishop with my Knight, which he avoided by moving his King over one space which allowed me to fork his King and Rook with a pawn. Things quickly devolved into a slaughter, but I can't say I was disappointed.



I decided to stay up a little late last night, to reward myself, I guess, for finishing the new chapter of Venia's Travels, so I finally started watching the episode of Boardwalk Empire from Sunday, but halfway through I was just too tired to stay up any longer. This was despite the fact that this episode featured the show's first really . . . I don't know how to put it, the first time the show really rolled up its sleeves and dived into itself. It was the scene where Agent Van Alden storms into a dentist's office and has the dentist inject with cocaine a man with his intestines falling out so Van Alden could interrogate him. It was all a great maelstrom of brutal weirdness around a frighteningly focused Fed, though I'm pretty sure the fact that the first thing the guy with his guts hanging out said when he woke up, "Go fuck your mother," in Yiddish, was inspired by the wonderful true story Shuli Egar told on The Howard Stern Show a couple months ago. Egar had been on a plane seated between an annoying Rabbi and the Rabbi's wife, neither of whom were willing to switch seats with Shuli in order to sit next to each other. When the Rabbi had tried to get Shuli to pass a baby to his wife, Shuli complained about the fact that the Rabbi and his wife had forced Shuli to sit between them. In Hebrew, the Rabbi said to his wife, "This is why I don't like them," not suspecting Shuli, who grew up in Israel, would understand and reply in Hebrew, "Why don't you go fuck your mother?" I suspect there are a lot of writers who listen to Howard Stern to help them come up with realistic sounding scenarios of regular ball busting guys.



I watched the rest of the episode with breakfast to-day. The show's still pretty good all together, though a lot of the time I'm just marvelling at how nicely shot a regular television series like this is now. I loved seeing Kelly Macdonald in her darling blue outfit, and she's great to watch, though the writers have some tricky ground to tread with her. The whole "innocent immigrant girl" shtick can't go in too many directions, especially since I don't sense there's much investment in her point of view. The show hasn't really connected with her yet beyond the type she's playing, though she's lovely to watch, and the scene where she's helping Lucy try on dresses was great. I'm so not sick of seeing Paz de la Huerta naked.



Twitter Sonnet #190

Long orange hair stifles bar top wasabi.
Thin roots choke the bland formica planter.
Solid vegetable cubes took a cabbie.
Carrot hosts offer canned morning banter.
Undead voices discuss zombie spinach.
Devil paper cups capture a clinic.
Suspiria lighting covets Greenwich.
Red and blue thought clouds betray a cynic.
Purple leaves preserve strange Eve's modesty.
Grains of edible sand stick to black sock.
Lettuce will grant turtles no amnesty.
Only one ship can belong to a dock.
X-ray guns spot a pink feather boa.
Remains of third flamingo of Noah.

Venia and Developments

The new Venia's Travels is online. It took me a lot longer to finish this chapter than I thought it was going to--I wasn't particularly behind with this one. I guess since I'm so near the end of the comic, I find myself just wanting to put in that extra bit of effort. I'm very pleased with this chapter, too.

Brave New Bag of Skittles with Such Flavours in It

The new trailer for The Tempest;



I love how it ends by telling us it's "Shakespeare's Final Masterpiece", like he was pulled out of retirement last year.

I'll definitely see this. I liked Julie Taymor's adaptation of Titus Andronicus, and I enjoyed both Frida and Across the Universe. Though, it's true, I didn't like any of those movies enough to want to watch one a second time. But even a halfway decent Shakespeare adaptation is worth seeing. I don't mind Helen Mirren in the Prospero role--she's a great actress, and if we have to change a character's sex for her to be in something genuinely good for the first time in, what, decades? I say go for it. I only wish they'd done the same for Ariel, but if we had more female directors putting sexualised young men on screen, maybe pervert artists like me wouldn't get so much heat about our gratuitous attention to sexy women.

Things I don't like about the trailer; Miranda's short hair, the casting of Djimon Hounsou as Caliban (it feels kind of racist), and Trinculo and Stephano playing dress up.

Things I do like; Russell Brand, Alfred Molina, Alan Cumming, Helen Mirren, and the pyrotechnics.

Partial Transmissions

I hadn't actually heard the audio of Rick Sanchez's radio rant about Jon Stewart and Jews when I posted about it a couple days ago, and when I did finally hear it, it seemed to me Sanchez' words were more ill-considered than truly anti-Semitic. It was the simple minded logic, "Jews can't be an oppressed minority because there are successful Jews." And I think when he called Stewart a bigot, the word he was really looking for was biased--and the group he sensed Stewart's bias against--dull, poorly considered blowhards in the news media--was misidentified by Sanchez as being . . . people who grew up poor, I think, I'm still not quite sure. So I rather like this video, the kind of civility and grace Stewart exhibits on the issue provides an example more people in the news media ought to provide.

I was feeling good about winning a chess game last, but afterwards I checked my e-mail and found that Moira had unfriended me on Live Journal with no explanation. I still feel slightly like I've been punched in the nose, and I've been thinking about it ever since, trying to sort out why I'm upset and whether I have any right to be upset. I haven't really been wondering too much why she unfriended me, though I don't know. There are just too many possibilities--she has at least two people still on her friends list who hate me intensely, at least one of whom thinks I'm an outright misogynist, and both of whom are relatively influential voices in circles Moi prefers to frequent. Also there's a kind of normalcy about this--it sort of reminded me of when Chris unfriended me without explanation. He eventually e-mailed me to explain that he didn't like the general tone of my blog anymore and that he found himself wanting to make fun of me and wasn't proud of it. It got me thinking about how I might have changed over the past year, but I still feel basically the same. I don't really see much difference between my posts now and when Chris acted like he really liked me. But obviously it could easily be something I'm too close to see, and whatever it is could also be the reason Moi unfriended me. There's also the fact that I hadn't commented on Moi's journal in several months, despite the fact that her cat was having medical problems, and I didn't donate money when she put up a donate button for her cat's medical bills, even though I usually donate whenever Moi puts up the button. Which is not to say I think Moi expects money for her friendship, but it might have seemed to her symptomatic of a general loss of interest on my part. The fact is, I generally don't like commenting on other people's journals for some reason. I certainly don't have time to keep up with all of them all the time, I spend most of the day working on my comic or running errands.

I suppose I could e-mail Moira directly and ask her, but it seemed to me that if I did get an answer, it'd just be depressing, and the fact that she didn't talk to me to begin with would indicate she didn't want to.

So mainly I've been thinking about whether or not I have any right to be upset. I don't consider everyone on my friends list friends--I just "friended" the journal of someone who posts only in Russian because I like the photographs he or she posts. I think Twitter's use of the word "follow" is far more apt. But when someone who's acted like a friend to me for more than ten years, with whom I've had long conversations and exchanged words of comfort in different crises, I do feel sort of justified in being hurt when being sort of coldly cut like that. But it doesn't seem to be something a lot of people online consider strange. People go through their social networks pruning people out of their lives all the time, and maybe it's an implicitly understood benefit of Internet society to a lot of people that exchanges of ideas and sympathies occur without conferring any form of meaningful connexions between individuals. Though honestly I've encountered plenty of that in "real life".

Oh, well. I guess this is just something else I have to suck up.

Twitter Sonnet #189

Gutsy questions demand colon answers.
Hash brown disaster is now immanent.
Rum makes spongy the skins of dinosaurs.
Twenty dollar puppets aren't permanent.
Rain washes the whiskey to second street.
Jonah missiles sprout from the fish canon.
Ribs bash barbeque sauce to a red beat.
River gullets take torrents of salmon.
Heroic grog obliterated rust.
Liquid spaz monster coloured the rain drops.
Post modern poltergeists painted the dust.
Final Santa's bag's but barley and hops.
Grey and living film fades a Union blue.
Flammable puddles under a white shoe.

Ravenous Undergarments

This has been one damned cluttered day, and I've had enough to do just staying awake, having been unable to sleep most of the night after drinking a lot of Bushmills while watching The Quiet Man--it was worth it, though, as I'd been needing just a nice relaxing evening with a movie. It was Amee's idea, who watched the movie at the same time as me in Philadelphia.



With breakfast to-day, at the hazily perceived hour of 10am, I watched the first episode of the new Gainax series, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. It's not a bad show, seeming to continue a lot of the tone of Re: Cutie Honey, as well as the sight gags involving absurd masses of policemen and cars.



It kind of feels like a cross between Invader Zim and Powerpuff Girls for perverts. Which sits well with me, except it feels a little too self-conscious, a little too tongue-in-cheek, as though its makers had been recently made aware of the fact that they were making fan-service and could only feel comfortable now continuing to make it if it's with a big, noisy wink. I love the concept of Panty and Stocking being superheroes, one of whom uses her panties, which transform into a pistol, and the other of whom uses her stocking, which transforms into a sword. That's the kind of thing that deserves copious cheesecake, but the self-conscious makers of the show feel compelled to draw them in a blocky, stylised form most of the time.



There's only one really pretty, pervy fan-service sequence, which is the transformation sequence. Which, since the days of Sailor Moon, has progressed in various anime series into something more overtly sexual, to comically sexual, to here, finally, self-consciously sexual and comical;



If only they'd gone the whole episode looking like that, but then I guess you'd basically have Re: Cutie Honey.



Like Gainax's Ebichu: The Housekeeping Hamster, Panty & Stocking features mature perspectives on sex that're extremely refreshing when compared to the standard parade of blushing virgins in anime series, though, again, it feels a bit more self-conscious here than in Ebichu.



Despite the lack of commitment to actual stakes for the characters, the action sequences are really nice, and the show really is funny, though I suppose not everyone will be comfortable with all the faecal humour in the first episode. But it's the best I've seen from Gainax in a while, despite being from the director of Gurren Lagann.

Suspended Things

Had a miniature computer crisis to-day when my monitor abruptly stopped working while I was transferring some files onto my iPod. The music kept playing on WinAmp, my iPod didn't act funny, and the monitor was on. It was like it just couldn't detect the computer anymore. I restarted the computer several times, called Tim to get his advice, and we puzzled over it a few minutes without getting anywhere. Then I noticed the cable wasn't plugged into the monitor--it'd fallen out. Gravity did it.

I noticed a button was missing on my shirt to-day, so I went to the mall for lunch so I could also get a new shirt. I got breadsticks and marinara sauce from Pat and Oscars and read more of the The Satanic Verses. After the interestingly abstract beginning, I'm finding the novel is starting to feel more like 1980s pop fiction. Howard Stern mentioned Salman Rushdie a couple weeks ago, saying that he'd never read Rushdie's work but admired the man for always managing to get hot chicks, despite the fact that Rushdie's a fat old man. My mind has kind of correlated this with the fact that the novel's so far focused on a couple of handsome, vulnerable men getting schooled by strong, beautiful women in pretty sex scenes. And then there was this;

The passengers were held on the hijacked aircraft for one hundred and eleven days, marooned on a shimmering runway around which there crashed the great sand-waves of the desert, because once the four hijackers, three men one woman, had forced the pilot to land nobody could make up their minds what to do with them . . . there was something posturing in the beauty of the three men, some amateurish love of risk and death in them that made them appear frequently at the open doors of the airplane and flaunt their bodies at the professional snipers who must have been hiding amid the palm-trees of the oasis. The woman held herself aloof from such silliness and seemed to be restraining herself from scolding her three colleagues. She seemed insensible to her own beauty, which made her the most dangerous of the four. It struck Saladin Chamcha that the young men were too squeamish, too narcissistic, to want blood on their hands. They would find it difficult to kill; they were here to be on television. But Tavleen [the female hijacker] was here on business. He kept his eyes on her. The men do not know, he thought. They want to behave the way they have seen hijackers behaving in the movies and on TV; they are reality aping a crude image of itself, they are worms swallowing their tails. But she, the woman, knows . . .

This follows a scene where Saladin's imposing mistress had collaborated with his father in humiliating him as his father brought out a servant woman dressed as and pretending to be Saladin's dead mother. I'm not quite sure how much of this is Rushdie's own preoccupations with women or something he's trying to say about Islam's perspective on women. It's kind of fascinating, though maybe a bit silly. In any case, the book's a lot more about sex than I expected it to be.

Selling the Star Bridge

Twitter Sonnet #188

Money snubs the fake plywood checkout stand.
Deceptive bottle sizes multiply.
Bones swim in creeks of dry fantasy sand.
There's more skeletons than x-rays imply.
Nets of dead leaf sun shields smother the pores.
Newsprint melts between tiles of hard ink.
Scribes constantly scribbled Saxon high scores.
Norman noobs took too long trying to think.
Colourless wrinkles delouse a smile.
Bland eyes float on rivers of a spiked punch.
Horses contend with a haystack's guile.
Gentle tarantula hairs rigged by bunch.
Border flax fibres make false flora weight.
Wool stocking force fields cause static stalemate.

I was glad to learn to-day Comic-Con's staying in San Diego for at least five more years. Until to-day, I thought 2011 was going to be the last year, and that I was going to have to decide whether I wanted to contend with an L.A. Con. I'm pretty sure I'll be living on another planet five years from now, so I'm set.

When I saw the headline a couple days ago "Earth-like Planet Found!" all over the place, I didn't bother reading the story because some little bullshit antenna on me knew right away this was an overstatement. That when I finally read an article, I knew it was going to be something like, "Now, when we say 'Earth-like', er, we mean . . . round, big . . . and in space."

And sure enough, this "Earth-like planet" "has a mass of three to four times that of Earth and takes 37 days to orbit the star. Astronomers believe it is a rocky planet with enough gravity to retain an atmosphere." And, "The average temperature on the planet is estimated to be between -31 to -12C, but the ground temperature would vary from blazing hot on the bright side and freezing on the dark side."

Yeah. Next time you say "Earth-like planet", it'd better be somewhere our descendants can live and wear shimmering pink togas while tragically repeating the follies of the Roman Empire but with lasers.

I played lots of World of Warcraft at Tim's house last night, getting my human rogue, Galatea, to level 49 in Burning Steppes. Then I came home and lost four games of chess before getting a stalemate on one. It was ridiculous--I had a Rook, a Knight, and five pawns against his King, Rook, and two pawns, but because I just couldn't figure out how to corner him, I whittled things down to my King and one pawn versus his King. Then I pinned myself with my own pawn, trying to promote it. I really am my own worst opponent.

Staying on the Surface

That's the sunset through the park behind the house yesterday. The rain clouds made everything exceptionally golden. And here's a slug I saw cruising around on the wet concrete;



Feeling pretty out of it to-day, like I have a hangover, and yet I didn't have any alcohol last night. What a gyp. For my dentist appointment on Tuesday, I decided I'd do a page of comic on Friday or Saturday, which I normally schedule as "off" days. But it's looking like I'm going to use both days for the one page because I just can't muster the energy to finish it right now. It's a particularly complicated page, too, which is probably part of it, and I needed to design a new outfit for Venia.

I've been rather amused by the developing story of the latest famous person to suddenly go into a crazy anti-Semitic rant, in this case Rick Sanchez, who I always thought was, like most CNN anchors, as boring as a pineapple, to use a Lupe Fuentes phrase. Now he's a guy who thinks Jon Stewart is a key figure in a vast, secret network of Jewish overlords. I suppose one could point out this is the second time CNN's fired someone for being an enemy of Jon Stewart. Though the real connexion there is more to do with generally lazy thinking--Rick Sanchez is just one pineapple in a whole barrel of them, he just happens to be an anti-Semitic pineapple.

Anyway, I think I need some outdoors now . . .